Michael Oser Rabin

Michael Oser Rabin, (born September 1, 1931, Breslau, Germany [now Wrocław, Poland]), German-born Israeli American mathematician and computer scientist and cowinner of the 1976 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science. Rabin and the American mathematician and computer scientist Dana S. Scott were cited for their early joint paper “Finite Automata and Their Decision Problem,” which has had a lasting impact on the field of automata theory, and for their subsequent independent work.

Rabin’s family immigrated to Palestine in 1935. In 1953 Rabin earned a master’s degree in mathematics from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and then he went to the United States to earn a doctorate (1957) in mathematics from Princeton University. Rabin taught at Princeton (1956–58) before returning to Israel to accept a professorship in mathematics at Hebrew University in 1958. In 1980 he became the school’s Albert Einstein Professor of Mathematics, a position he held until he retired as emeritus professor in 1999. During that time he also held a joint appointment at Harvard University, first as the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science (1981–83) and then as the Thomas J. Watson, Sr., Professor of Computer Science (1983–12); in 2013 he became Thomas J. Watson, Sr., Research Professor of Computer Science.

In addition to his work on the decision problem in mathematics, Rabin codeveloped the Miller-Rabin test, an algorithm for determining if a given number is a prime number. This was just one aspect of Rabin’s numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and data encryption. Perhaps his most far-reaching work was his invention, with the Israeli American computer scientist Yonatan Aumann and the Chinese computer scientist Yan Zong Ding, of Hyper-Encryption, the first provably unbreakable encryption scheme.

In addition to the Turing Award, Rabin was honoured with the 1974 Rothschild Prize in Mathematics, the 1980 Harvey Prize in Science and Technology, the 1995 Israel Prize in Exact Sciences/Computer Science, the 2000 IEEE Charles Babbage Award in Computer Science, and the 2004 EMET Prize in the Exact Sciences: Computer Sciences. Rabin served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Computer and Systems Science, the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, and the Journal of Algorithms. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1975), the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanity (1982), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1984), the American Philosophical Society (1988), the French Academy of Sciences (1995), the Royal Society of London (2007), and the European Academy of Science.